We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [201]
"Ma, are you sad?" he asked, with the usual inviting tone of voice. She could confide in her little man.
Her grief was a burden so heavy, he came close to collapsing under it, and yet he couldn't lay it down. With that burden on his shoulders he was someone. Without it, he didn't know whether he'd be visible to her at all.
"No, I'm not sad," his mother said. "Leave me alone for a while. I'm thinking."
He started playing with Edith. "Where's Daddy? Where's the man?" she asked.
But she wasn't really interested in the answer. She'd seen so little of Albert. Daddy was just a word to her: she probably thought it was Albert's name. She was just a child.
Knud Erik himself no longer knew what he was. Just now, his mother had met his offer of consolation with a blank stare. This was new to him. Had their pact dissolved? Was he no longer her little man? If he wasn't, then what was he?
***
When he was very young, Knud Erik had learned that the world could disappear and reappear all by itself. A blind would be pulled down, and everything would vanish into darkness. Then a few hours later it would roll up again with a clatter, and the world would return. The bright blue canvas of day would give way to the blackness of night, only to come back the next morning.
Loss was like the blind not rolling up again. Loss was a night that never ended.
His father had vanished in the night, but for a long time Knud Erik kept hoping that the blind he'd disappeared behind would roll back up with a clatter. He searched the horizon for a piece of string he could give a quick pull to, so the blind would roll up and his father—a man whose face had already dissolved in a mist—would reappear. He'd tried repeatedly to conjure his father's features, never certain if it was the same face as last time, until nothing was left but the word Dad. He'd had one once. The certainty was like a gap in his mind, a white spot on the canvas of his memory.
Now he had to get over the loss of Albert.
He remembered him for all the good things he'd been. They'd been mates, friends, more. Albert was an entire universe that had embraced him, with arms strong enough to protect from everything. And he knew that the old man had loved him, though he'd never said it aloud.
In death, Albert would help him one last time.
With his ginger hair, sinewy body, and sprinkling of rust-colored freckles, Anton was a figure so brim full of fighting spirit that far bigger boys respectfully made way for him. He kept a half-tamed seagull called Tordenskjold in a cramped bamboo cage in his parents' garden, and if you wanted to be on good terms with Anton, you popped a herring into Tordenskjold's hungry beak. He'd found the seagull as a chick at Langeholm Head, where he rowed every spring to plunder the gulls' nests of eggs, which he sold to Tønnesen, the baker to the south. He put them in his sand cakes and his vanilla cookies, which earned him the nickname Seagull Baker.
Anton's own nickname was the Terror of Marstal. He'd acquired it when he'd blown the porcelain insulator at the top of a lamppost to smithereens with an air gun and blacked out half the town. The gun, borrowed from a cousin, was one he normally used for shooting sparrows for a farmer in Midtmarken, who paid him four øre per bird. When the farmer tossed the dead birds onto the dunghill, Anton would simply retrieve them and resell them to his gullible client, presenting them as freshly killed—he often sold the same ones four or five times. As a result, the farmer had acquired an exaggerated impression of the size of the sparrow population plaguing his fields.
Anton was from Møllevejen, on the northern side of town; Knud Erik, who now lived in Prinsegade, belonged to the southern side. The invisible line that separated the two halves of Marstal was one that the boys took as seriously as if it were a front of the recent world war. Two factions, known as the North Gang and the South Gang, engaged in an unending and merciless war. By rights Knud Erik and Anton should have been natural enemies. But